Noam Chomsky

Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile.

If by ‘intellectual’ you mean people who are a special class who are in the business of imposing thoughts and forming ideas for people in power, and telling people what they should believe…they’re really more a kind of secular priesthood, whose task it is to uphold the doctrinal truths of the society. And the population SHOULD be anti-intellectual in that repect.

So investors don’t go down to the television studio and make sure that the local talk show host or news director is doing what they want. On the other hand, there are other complex mechanisms which make it fairly certain that they will do what the owners and investors want.

The educational system was a highly predictable victim of the neoliberal reaction, guided by the maxim of ‘private affluence and public squalor’. Funding for public education has sharply declined. Tuition has exploded, leading to a plague of unpayable student debt.

Cointelpro really told you something about the government. Therefore, it was basically suppressed, it is still suppressed so that people don’t know anything about it. Watergate, on the other hand, was a minor scandal.

In accordance with the prevailing conceptions in the U.S., there is no infringement on democracy if a few corporations control the information system: in fact, that is the essence of democracy.

I always touch people, because I know that there’s a level of anxiety, people are teary or they’re nervous, and I just try to physically hold them and bring them down and say: ‘We’re here. I’m just Michelle.’

I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me.

If Stain was such a bad guy why do all these people attribute to him quotes he didn’t make or change his actual quotes just enough to make them seem bad? Seem bad rather than visionary.

A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

Without perestroika, the cold war simply would not have ended. But the world could not continue developing as it had, with the stark menace of nuclear war ever present.

The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is besides the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.

We’re no longer in the Cold War. Eavesdropping on friends is unacceptable.

Only time, education and plenty of good schooling will make anti-segregation work.

The global environment crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future.

Nobody and nothing will stop Russia on the road to strengthening democracy and ensuring human rights and freedoms.

The financial industry, that means Goldman Sachs, if managed properly, will calculate the potential cost to itself if a loan goes bad, but not the impact on the financial system, which can be severe. This inherent deficiency of markets is well known.

You can live within the institutions and work hard to change them.

But the issue has to do with land, which is our land.

Here at home, when Americans were standing in long lines to give blood after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we squandered an obvious opportunity to make service a noble cause again, and rekindle an American spirit of community.

Trump does have a base, a voter base. He’s kicking them in the face with abandon. And the idea is: How do you hold onto them while you’re doing this? Not an easy trick. And this, I think, is part of the con.